Satanicpornocultshop – Maiden Voyage

I’m guessing that you may not have heard of Satanicpornocultshop. I never had before the end of 2013, but when a respected fellow Audiophile called me and insisted that I listen to their latest LP “Maiden Voyage” more than once before I made my mind up, I thought I better had. When I enquired “what style of music they produce?”, only to hear the reply ‘Japanese, truly experimental’ (something that here on DPR we have not focused on at all before) I have to be honest, I was expecting the worst. I must admit my ears were sonically challenged on the first listen, with erratic beats and samples so jumbled, that my brain had difficulty processing what I was hearing.

After listening to Maiden Voyage enough to ‘feel it’, I knew I would have difficulty in reviewing it, but needed to share this completely original music (please no comments from those who don’t like samples). Here is some attempt at this.

On the first listen, the song “A Part Of A Loud Minority” which contains the sample of the same named song by the Saxophonist Frank Foster (also sampled by another Japanese electronic band; United Funky Organization (UFO), back in the early nineties) was the only track that instantly warmed too, probably because I love the original and UFO’s version. On the second and further listens of the album My understanding/feeling of it became clearer. Many of the samples are from the styles of music played on the ‘Gumbo Hour’ i.e. Soul & Jazz etc. and there are elements of Hip Hop and electronic music in its production, but it is also none of them, and more. The rhythms at first appear erratic and the songs disjointed, due to the cutting room and re-assemblage approach of making the music, but subsequent listening reveals layers upon layers of sound backed by a single beat. I love the approach of speeding up and slowing down the beats on the song ‘A Woman Like You’, and some of the beats on the LP sound as if they have been made by an electronic woodpecker if ever there was one. The whole album is a contradiction of complexity and straightforwardness (if that makes any sense). For me other highlight of the album is the 60’s Parisian feel of ‘Jeu De Jambes De France’ with great arrangements on the accordion, piano and saxophone over an erratic rhythm style.

It’s different, its well produced, its now, but probably too complex for most, but the further you listen the more straightforward and simple it sounds. Dave Brubeck once said something on the lines of, the more you listen to music, the more you will will understands its complexities without even being able to play or write it. He was right.

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